Villages Page 8

  Back in Cambridge as a sophomore, he found the squeeze slightly lessened; Owen knew the ropes now. In September, he ventured across the river to see the Braves play the Phillies; he rooted for the Phillies but kept it to himself, in the shirtsleeved crowd whose skimpiness foretold the move of the franchise to Milwaukee within a year. The symmetrical eight-team leagues of his boyhood, as immovably fixed, he had thought, as the Ten Commandments, were beginning to shift and slide across the country. On a Friday night in November he and a pack of five other future engineers took the subway at Kendall and walked up Cambridge Street to the Old Howard at Scollay Square, which itself would soon disappear. Before a somewhat sardonic all-male audience of sailors and geezers and college boys, a glittering woman with an implausible cinnamon-red upsweep strutted in fewer and fewer clothes and ended up on her back on a velvet chaise longue kicking her legs in the air in a sufficient pantomime of orgasm, while the drums in the orchestra pit pounded. Under the harsh stage lights, well-used, half-amused women went through routines that did not seem lifeless to Owen; in feathers and breakaway ball gowns and hourglass corsets and ruffled garters and satin heels, these women had the pure life of dreams, dreams sent up from the pit of oneself, fantastic enactments of what was at bottom most real.

  A New England daintiness and wit leavened what in Pennsylvania, in the milltown brothels and dives, had a sullen, suety heaviness, slightly rancid. Up here, where the Puritans had left their traces in the white steeples and prim brick architecture, sex was tricked up, if not altogether banned. Boston’s highly evolved civic morality prescribed certain limits on costume. Pasties on the nipples, G-string on the pubis, high heels on the feet, tiaras on the head, bright paint on the face—all mitigated the simple glimmering nudity that Elsie in her innocence had offered him one night. Nudity, New England seemed to say, was too serious, too vulnerable, to commodify; only goddesses in marble or Mother Eve in crabbed engravings could flaunt it aboveground. Underground, there were stag films in frat houses, projected to uneasy hooting, starring actors and actresses whose sagging, pouchy, wistful, and impotent humanity roused scorn in the viewers, young and inexperienced as they were.

  In his sophomore year, then, after a summer of the surveying crew and a few unsatisfactory dates with Elsie, who was more guarded and sparing of herself now that she was a Penn State freshman, Owen returned in his daydreams to Phyllis, without ever having spoken a word to her. But she turned up in a class that he too was taking, Introduction to Digital Computer Coding and Logic:

  Survey of principles of logical design and of the elements of coding programs for large-scale digital computers, discussed from the user’s point of view. Brief descriptions of the logical structure of digital computers operating at M.I.T. and elsewhere. Interpretation of sequences of arithmetical and logical operations into digital computer instructions, with examples chosen from typical engineering, scientific, and business problems and from real-time control applications. Techniques for simplifying and improving the programming and operating of computers by the use of subroutines. Execution on the M.I.T. Whirlwind I computer of examples discussed in class to provide first-hand experience with automatic high-speed machines.

  v. How Phyllis Was Won

  You’re getting all of this?”

  It was an awkward, side-of-the-mouth kind of ice-breaker, addressed to the tall sandy-haired girl as, having spotted her momentarily alone in the post-class rush and quickening his steps, Owen drew abreast of her in the long hall.

  Her eyes as she darted to him in polite surprise were a blue so mild as to be gray, like her winter coat, which he thought of as the color of a dove in the distance. Her eyebrows and lashes were almost colorless, and her mouth as she spoke had an intriguing frozen quality, a delayed way of moving, her whole face delicate as if outlined in silverpoint, though shot through with living tints of pink. Her eyelids were pink, and the tip of her nose, and the crests of her slanted cheekbones. “Oh,” she said cautiously. “I think so. It’s all so lovely.” Her reply had a certain soft bounce to it, suggesting that she had been waiting for him to approach her, having sensed that he wanted to. They were some weeks into the course; leaves were turning, football was being played at more frivolous universities, and her nose still showed a bit of sunburn, achieved lying on a blanket in the grass, in the Great Court or down by the river. Strange, Owen thought, how sun-worshippers often have unsuitably fair skins.

  He went on, in a voice that sounded whiny in his own ears, “I didn’t expect all this rather creepy mathematical logic, Frege and Russell and Gödel’s paradoxes—all this propositional calculus, my God, what a tempest in a hypothetical tea-pot! I thought we were going to learn how to program digital computers.”

  “Oh, we will, I’m sure. But he’s”—the assistant professor who taught the course, whose name was Klein, his style murmurous and spasmodic and hard to follow—“leading up to something, a whole new way of looking at numbers, seeing them the way machines do instead of how we do.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Owen said, more sarcastically than he had intended. He was sounding like a malcontent, a surly know-nothing, and after all that watching at a distance might lose this marvellous girl her first minute on the hook. This was a fastidious, almost transparent fish on his line, with surprising, quick leaps to her talk. She made him feel (and always would) dark, a little thick-blooded, slightly slow and heavy.

  “You’re too practical,” she told him. “Mr. Klein wants us to think about how we think. Our so-called thinking is messy, with many little determinations, more or less simultaneous, whereas machines have no intuition, no mass of experience. Normal human illogic won’t do for them. Nothing is obvious to them that isn’t absolutely spelled out.”

  “They can do only what we know how to order them to perform, like Lady Lovelace said.” He was parroting Klein, that silky embodied intelligence, who spoke with a retractive tremor, as if voicing anything loudly would jar his delicate brain. “Wasn’t she something, for a woman back then?” Owen added lamely, trying to keep up in the hall, sidestepping and being bumped as Phyllis floated at his side. “She was a number,” he added, a joke to dilute, perhaps, the taste of flirtation in his mouth; for by bringing up Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and Charles Babbage’s handmaiden in the invention of the Analytical Engine, he had hoped to flatter this other mathematically minded female.

  “She was,” was Phyllis’s flat reply. She was drifting away; he had failed to engage her. They had come, in the numbered maze, to Room 7, the ten-pillared entrance hall, where right-angled paths diverged. Seeing they must part, and recognizing that this stranger had made an effort, she took a livelier tone: “Didn’t you like, today, the way he diagrammed inference? All these ‘well-formed’ formulas for something so obvious we all know it without thinking twice about it?”

  He mustn’t lose her; he must try to rise to her with some provocation, something to carry over to their next encounter. “You’re not practical?” he asked.

  The two stood, immobile in the flood of swaddled, pimpled, boisterous bodies hurrying to their next class. “I guess not,” she told him, in her gentle, fading voice. “I love what’s pure and useless.” She shrugged, lightly, apologizing for all of her, the whole length of her pale, pink, diffidently carried body.

  “That’s beautiful of you,” he told her. It just popped out of him, too coarse a compliment; he saw her wince. Owen hurried to patch it up: “Look. Let’s have coffee some time—would you like to?”

  He saw, there in the enhanced light of this high-domed chamber, that he was adding to her burdens—she was already fending off many suitors, many potential coffee-mates. He tried another joke, taken from the lecture they had just heard, which had touched on the Turing machine. “That’s not an if/then,” Owen assured Phyllis. “No necessary consequences. It’s more an n plus one. You’re n, n for ‘knows it all,’ and I’m a one, meaning ‘simpleton.’ I’m a simple scholarship hick who is dying to ask you about”—he snatched at a
nother phrase from the lecture, Klein’s concluding phrase—“ ‘primitive recursion.’ ”

  “That’s what it’s going to be all about, primitive recursion,” she prophesied, turning away after an upward glance at the clock. There was a characteristic look, he would learn, a regretful gaiety in the moment of parting, that she would convey over her shoulder; she was never lovelier, with more affection in her smile, than when saying goodbye. “And I don’t know it all,” she added, leaving his direct question unanswered.

  But she did, as winter bore down upon the school, share coffee and then more with him. Why? What did she like about him? She was a year older than he, as Elsie had been a year younger, and Owen saw her as a creature above him, in advance of him, moving easily in these realms of enlightenment. In MIT’s forest of fact and concept he had at first felt lost, but his marks were all right and got better as he blended in and his interests narrowed. He was tall, thin then, with a thick head of soft hair, darker than his father’s wispy brown; he let it grow carelessly long, in that strictly barbered era. Where so many of the high achievers were bespectacled Asian-Americans and pudgy Jews, Phyllis must have liked the big-boned way Owen stood taller than she; they looked good walking together. Though never athletically competitive in the public schools of Pennsylvania, he had a nervous wiriness that, in those daydreaming farmhouse years, he had worked up into minor feats of agility—juggling three tennis balls, hopping over a broom held in both hands before him, taking harmless pratfalls on the steel-edged stairs, thus alarming Phyllis and making her laugh when she saw he was unhurt. He loved seeing the blood of surprise pinken her pale, thin-skinned face. His mock injuries parodied a wish to abase himself before her that was real enough—the clown, the pretender, daring to present himself before the princess.

  As winter took away outdoor spaces from the students, they crowded after class and in the evenings into the luncheonettes and cafeterias and cheap Chinese and Indian restaurants of Kendall Square—not yet a high-tech Oz but a pocket of low-end industry darkened by a century’s grime—and the southern end of Central Square. Doors swung open to admit sharp drafts of snow-flecked air with fresh arrivals, and mirrors sweated as the heat of the packed bodies interfaced with the cold walls. Wedged around a Formica-topped table with three or four others of Phyllis’s set—Anne-Marie Morand from Montreal, Amy Toong from Boston, Jake Lowenthal from Flatbush, Bobby Sprock from Chicopee—Owen admired the way she listened, said so little, just fed cigarettes into those pale, numb lips and exhaled up into her dirty-blond bangs. She had the magnetism of those who make no effort to shine; she held them together, many actors playing to an audience of one. Noisy, fast-talking Jake was mocking the first digital computers: Harvard’s Mark I, ENIAC down in Philly, the Lincoln Laboratories Whirlwind housed a few blocks from where they sat. “Mountains that don’t produce a mouse,” he proclaimed. “Thousands of switches, boxes and boxes of punch cards, miles of wiring, tons of hardware all to do what a slide rule and half a brain can do in thirty seconds.”

  “Jake, you don’t believe that,” Phyllis told him, so levelly and quietly Owen felt a jealous pang: a well-established connection was being used.

  “Why don’t I? Hey, Phyl, why don’t I? By the time ENIAC was built, the war was over and the Army couldn’t use it. It was a thirty-ton dog. It takes two hundred kilowatts to run it, it gobbles up electricity even when it isn’t running, it costs a fortune just to keep the tubes cool—there are eighteen thousand of them. Eighteen thousand tubes. Not to mention ten thousand condensers and six thousand switches.”

  “Yes, and it does math it would take thousands of people to do by hand,” Amy Toong said, glancing quickly sideways to check that Phyllis, to whom Jake had spoken, was not replying.

  “You’re talking obsolete,” Bobby Sprock told Jake. “Vacuum tubes are on the way out. Already, Whirlwind’s storage unit uses magnetic cores instead of tubes. Punch cards are being replaced by magnetic tapes. Bell Labs has come up with something called a transistor that does the switching with semi-conducting strips of silicon and doped germanium. Circuitry is going to be all thin-film layering soon. Pretty soon we’ll have a computer no bigger than a refrigerator.”

  “Yeah, and we’re going to fly to the moon on gossamer wings,” Jake scoffed. Owen wondered if their ganging up on Jake amounted to anti-Semitism; but his persistent aggression seemed to invite it, to relish it. He said, “There are molecular limits in thin-film they’ve reached already. Face it, guys and gals, computers are basically clunky energy-hogs so expensive they’ll only ever have one customer, and that’s Uncle Sam. Look at UNIVAC. Remington Rand finally got the kinks out, mostly, and now they can’t sell them. They run so hot they’ve got to put dry ice in the ductwork.”

  “Well,” Owen pointed out, as mildly as possible in imitation of Phyllis, “UNIVAC picked Eisenhower over Stevenson right enough. And did it so early nobody believed it; the network had the results and didn’t broadcast them!”

  “Predicting elections is a stunt,” Jake said.

  “The first airplanes were stunts. The first horseless carriages,” said Bobby Sprock, with the agonized expression and near-stutter of those who feel all the justice of an argument heaped on their side. “The first t-telephone, right here in Boston!”

  “Analog computers, I can see,” Jake conceded, with a tongue emboldened by his opponent’s sputtering. “Amplifiers, differentiators—that’s what I call electrical engineering. This digital, binary stuff is a toy—it’s one step up from tic-tac-toe.”

  “Jacob, aren’t you funny?” Phyllis said, not smiling. Owen heard the soft familiar tone with which she addressed him, and felt—the jolt that went straight across his chest—certainty that these two were connected as more than friends. She was the passive, negative pole of a number of highly charged connections: this inference, there in the circuit of close-pressed bodies and tousled wool wraps jammed around a small table littered with the soy-scented ruins of a Chinese meal, did not unplug his insulated belief that the course of his life must flow through this particular girl, this woman.

  That she had not been born the moment he first set eyes on her, that he found her in the midst of attachments old and new would have dismayed him had he not been numbed into becoming a mere implement in the hand of a designing Nature. Their bodies knew they would make good babies. In the midst of this student seethe and chatter, they were kindred exotics, sheltered children groping after reality, singular in a pride they couldn’t express, gifted but defective, set apart. They promised to each other a fresh genetic start, a beginning of real life. He had no cause for jealousy. As computers know, the past is mere storage, to be called upon only as the present calculation requires. When they were indeed alone together, he asked for no more information than she volunteered, and she was vague. “Oh, I went out a few times with this section man from Projective Geometry, but that was last spring, and I have no idea where he’s got the idea that I owe him something. I can’t believe it was anything I said.”

  “How do you know he thinks you owe him something?”

  “He keeps sending me unpleasant letters. He’s very angry I won’t go out with him any more. Now he’s angry about you.”

  “Me?” Flattered, scared: Owen’s tender stomach registered these incompatibles. “But why me especially? I’m just one of your crowd—why would I stick out?”

  “Well,” Phyllis said, “to him you do.” If she was in his arms, she wriggled a little deeper, as if wanting to shrink away from the entanglements her unassuming beauty had brought upon her and, it seemed, on him, too. “He’s right, of course. We’re more—serious?”

  “We are?” Again, the abdominal chafing of incompatibles. He wanted life but was scared of it. It was easier to roll over and dream on. In her light-handed, abstracted way Phyllis was tenacious. “O.K.,” Owen said. “What shall we do about—? What’s his name?”

  “Ralph.”

  “Ralph. How can you be worried about somebody called Ralph? Ralphs are
roly-poly, beer-belly types.”

  “Not this one. He’s short, and dense. He does boxing to keep fit. One of his letters talked about smashing my face in.”

  “Oh my God. Your gorgeous face?” Her skin appeared to him thinner than other people’s; it sunburned in minutes, and a blush stayed on her cheeks for an hour; his lightest touch, he felt, travelled instantly to nerve centers all over her body.

  She blushed; even her lowered eyelids blushed. “That’s what he called it, too. Gorgeous. He wrote that he would leave marks on me I would always remember him by.”

  “Oh, dear. What kind of section man was he? How was his Projective Geometry?”

  When Owen tried to remember this conversation, he had trouble locating it. The authorities of MIT discouraged privacy for mixed-sex couples. MIT didn’t know where to put its female students; some were housed across the river, at 120 Bay State Road, and then the university opened up a section of Bexley Hall. Phyllis’s room in either dormitory was out of bounds, but there were chintz-covered sofas at 120 Bay State Road, and corners of the big reception room where the lights—stately floor lamps with pleated shades and three-way bulbs—could be dimmed to coziness. Students would lounge and lie in the semi-dark with their brush-cuts and perms; the boys then wore white bucks and narrow rep ties, the Ivy look not yet yielded to the blue-jeaned geek look, and the girls wore single-strand pearls and pastel sweaters whose wool seemed to melt in the hand. It wasn’t until Phyllis moved in her senior year back to her parents’ home off Garden Street that she and Owen could be alone between four walls; but that was later, surely, than the scare from Ralph Finneran.